Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

You Can’t Always Keep Kids Safe

By Lisa Belkin November 18, 2008 8:30 amNovember 18, 2008 8:30 am

Illustration by Barry Falls

One of the first things I did when I moved into our house 17 years ago was baby-proof it. Locks on the toilets and the low-to-the-ground cabinets. Guards on the outlets. Gates on the stairs. The most labor intensive part was attaching plexiglass to the railings along the hall staircase, so that little heads would not get stuck between the slats.

Over the years most of the locks and barriers went away, but the plexiglass has remained. I have thought periodically of taking it down, but it had become a talisman of sorts, an emblem of safety in an unsafe world. Then, this weekend, Alex , now 14, walked into the kitchen holding a shard of the barrier in his hand. The plastic had cracked. It was time for the protective shield to go.

It happened over a weekend already spent thinking of how we really can’t protect our children. All month I had been reading about 15-year-old Brandon Crisp, whose parents buried him on Friday. The boy had fought with them over a video-game in mid-October, on Thanksgiving Day in Canada, where the family lives. Steve and Angelika Crisp thought their son was obsessed with the online game “Call of Duty 4” and, protecting him, took his Xbox away.

Brandon responded as many teenagers might, by packing a bag and announcing he was leaving home. His father responded as many parents might, by playing along and reminding him to take a warm coat. That was the last his parents saw him alive. Thousands of volunteers spent weeks searching wooded areas near the family’s home, and finally found his body fairly close-by. He’d died from injuries sustained when falling out of a tree.

Mairin Din’s parents have learned that harsh truth this month, too. Her mother, Erin Molloy, is the mayor of Irvington, N.Y., the town next to the one where I live, and on Friday my village newspaper brought news that she’d resigned several days before.

Mairin, an effervescent 18-year-old, a high school track star, had just begun her freshman year at Swarthmore College in late September, when she was riding her bike on campus and collided with a moving car. She suffered significant brain injury, and her parents have spent every day since then by her hospital bed. Her mother’s resignation letter said “the long road she faces in recovery have prevented me from participating in the governance of the village.”

I wish there was a useful nugget here — a bit of helpful advice, a moral to the story, a practical plan that would work as well as a baby-gate or a toilet-lock. But the terrifying fact is that the entire purpose of parenting is to move them out of our safe embrace and into the world, where we cannot protect them much at all.

Just yesterday, after hanging up from a brief telephone conversation, I found my 3 yo had disappeared. After a long, frantic time of calling his name throughout our small house, I had visions of him strangled somehow, or suffocated under a blanket where he’d been hiding, or perhaps he had fallen down our basement steps…

I began to shake and sweat, until a tiny noise in a closet in my office alerted me.
“Son?”
“Mama?”
He was fine and had just chosen to hide from me despite my panicked sounding voice.

Often, while driving my car, I’ll look into the back seat to confirm that yes, I did remember the baby in her baby seat. I have an ongoing fear that she has been left behind.

Life is precious, the old true cliche. Parents, I think, know this better than anyone. When the fears get to be high, I just remind myself — hey, you made it this far, as did your brother, your parents, your spouse…odds are good.

This is horrible. Horrible for the parents. And horrible to print two sad tales that only increase the fears parents have for keeping their children safe from harm. These stories are better saved for sympathetic talks with friends and neighbors not presented in a “news” forum.

I think the moral here is that while children are still within our protective embrace, we have to do our best to prepare them for the outside world, where they will have no one but their own selves and (hopefully) good judgement to protect themselves. That is what I got out of this story anyway

Last year, other parents’ fear become something of a fascination and a serious challenge for me. As the president of an elementary school PTA, I was confronted by the direct and indirect workings of those fears daily.

I have a about why fear seems to cripple so many parents I know (to the point where they are genuinely afraid about things over which they have zero control and subvert that fear into things like playing on the swings, snacks on birthdays, and whether or not to try to prevent voting at public schools).

Parents are biologically predisposed to protect their children from harm. One of the tools humans have developed to do this is fear. Biologically, parents are armed with fear. But in a century that has seen the actual threats to children decrease so dramatically as to make the death of a child from a common disease seem almost like an impossibility, it seems that parental fear has attached itself to a variety of free-floating objects. This is not to say that there are not serious dangers in the world from which parents should try to protect their children. It is simply an observation about the level of cortisol and adrenaline that one often finds at preschool and elementary school these days. What do we do with our fear when we have so little to fear?

The losses you describe in your post are, of course, monumental in the lives of the families you describe. Yet, they are unusual, singular. It’s the remarkable fact that so many children do survive that makes living with parental fear so complex in our present world.

Excellent article. I remember when I “ran away” at 5. My sister decided we didn’t want to follow my mothers rules and were going to live with our grandmother in CA (we lived in GA!). So my mom helped us pack a lunch and allowed me to take lunchbox full of pennies and wait for the bus outside our house (she won’t let me take any clothes bc she had bought them). Eventually, I got tired and went home, but I cannot imagine such an innocent event happening in this day and age.

You can only protect them so much, most of the time without them knowing it. Then, terrified, you got to let them go, dread the mistakes they may make, wait for them to mature, spend sleepless nights and believe in Karma.
Asha

Wow. Powerful stuff. As hard as we try, we can’t protect our kids from everything known and unknown. Some of that stuff they just have to learn on their own. I can see myself having the same argument with my 12 year old that Brandon’s parents did, and doing the exact same thing. “Let him see how tough it is out on your own”, I’d think. And now, after reading this post, I’ll think twice. Parenting is a long and twisted road, filled with little bumps and huge potholes. Sometimes we barrel over the bumps, and sometimes we get stuck in a pothole. We all make mistakes, big and small. I bet Brandon’s parents are wishing they didn’t make that last one.

Just a reminder that the more we become obsessed with and “terrified” of our kid’s safety, the less we are able to react intuitively about how to best protect them. Keeping kids safe is not necessarily about tying up all the loose ends, but opening up your heart and letting go.

One of the greatest mistakes parents – or people in general for that matter – make is that they can control the world. If that were possible no bad stuff would ever happen, and good parents would never have problem children. Even as a young mother I knew the world would not adjust to my daughter, and that my daughter would have to learn to adjust to the world. How do children who are protected from all those germs ever develop any resistance to those germs without exposure? My brother was killed by a drunk driver when he was 14. No, it’s not fair when parents have to bury a child, but it happens. Life isn’t fair, and accepting that reality is a good start toward a healthy repsect for the fragility of life.

This is kinda a parent’s nightmare story. When My son was 1 1/2 he became ill with a virus and had very high temps. My husband and I were sitting on the couch and I was holding him on my lap facing me and suddenly he felt very still. I leaned him away from me and saw he wasn’t breathing and his lips looked blue. I shook him but that didn’t rouse him and I layed him down and began mouth to mouth and told my husband to watch for his chest to rise. I tried to blow in a breath which my husband said didn’t go in. I gave a second breath that did go in and a third and he still wasn’t breathing on his own. I remember looking at him and thinking, “So that’s it, he can be taken away from me just like that”. Luckily after the fourth breath he began to cry and so did I. No matter what you do or teach your kids to do to be safe, “they can be taken away from you just like that”

As a professional whose job is dedicated to prevent or stem underage drinking in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia,I feel that the ability to keep kids safe vanishes for many parents once their kids enter high school. That’s because in our community (like most communities) drinking alcohol on the weekend becomes the social norm for kids who want to be popular and accepted. And they are not just taking a few sips. Many 14- and 15-year olds begin their experimentation with alcohol by imbibing enough to land up in the hospital.

As head of a Youth Aid Panel where community volunteers meet monthly with students who have received underage drinking citations from the police,
I hear the same comment from parents at these meetings where we assign community service and essays to these first-time “juvenile offenders,” :
“I have to let them go to the parties, because I can’t chain them in the house.”
These parents feel very worried about their children’s safety, but powerless to control and protect them, relying on luck and their kids’ ability to make good decisions, despite being under the influence.

It’s an interesting point – one we find especially poignant in Israel right now. My oldest son is in the army. Like you, I babyproofed the world around him…and now…now I can’t. It’s a scary time once a child grows enough to go out into the world; once they drive, once they move towards the very important goal of independence.

I agree in part with Lori. If anything, our children statistically are safer, and certainly not less safe than we were at the same age. However, we have more news about the incidents that do still happen and therefore feel greater stress and pressure to protect our children from things we are not able to control. And sometimes, like the plexiglass, what we think will protect our children actually ends up causing another issue and potential injury. I would rather see efforts go towards our best efforts to educate our children about the world, rather than try to keep them from experiencing it.

To Responsibility: Just wondering, how is it that a girl away at college who got hit by a car while riding her bike is at all the fault of irresponsible parents? Or even the boy who “ran away” and fell out of a tree? Kids ride bikes and try to run away all the time–not because their parents are irresponsible. I agree that parents need to take care of their kids, but the whole point of this blog was that no matter what you do to protect your child, you can’t always do it. It doesn’t matter if you are the most responsible parents in the world, things can still go horribly wrong. The trick is to not let fear paralyze you and keep you from letting your children live their own lives.

Our local papers have reported that a 16-month old has been killed by a hunter’s bullet in Swan Lake, NY. The child was inside a house at the time she was shot. The hunter had shot a deer, climbed down from his tree stand, and then fired off another shot. The newspaper did not say why he had fired this second shot. You cannot even guarantee a child’s safety inside your own home!
You’ve just got to love your children every day because each day can be our last, or theirs.

FEAR. Yes, it is sometimes a reasonable emotion, and one for which examples like the ones you share, justify.

But there is also FEAR that is unnecessary and undermines parent-child relationships. The fear that drives “helicopter parents” (who don’t give kids the rein they need for their very development) is what I refer to here. This fear immobilizes parents, negatively impacts their ability to accurately evaluate situations and communicate effectively with their kids. And it undermines kids’ development. While there is no “moral to the story” or “practical nugget” to the irrational fear that every parent feels about catastrophic events, it’s important for parents to distinguish the second kind of fear because that is under their control. And for their teenagers’ sake they must hold that in check.
Read “Fear and Parenting:” //tinyurl.com/5ltsf9

I’m an ER doctor and I often see these problems come into the Emergency Room. The newly diagnosed leukemia, the infant with a life threatening infection, and the teenager who made one bad decision and ends up in our trauma bay. These experiences make my view of the world a bit skewed. I have to remind myself that these types of problem are infrequent in absolute terms. That being said, children and in particular teens, need to be protected from car crashes.

Modeling good driving is paramount from day one. Always wear your seat belt, don’t talk on the phone or text messages while driving. If your 7 year old sees this, chances are they will do something similar when they get to be 16.

For younger ones, make sure they are in appropriate seat restraints –as they do work. Children up to 4 years need to be in a harnessed restraint seat and those children 4-8 need to be in a belt positioning booster seat until they are at least 4′ 9″ tall. Also, kids need to be in the back seat.

One parent asked me, when can my kid ride in the front seat, I said, “when you love your kid 10% less”…

Sure, parents can’t always be there, nor should we blame ourselves for things out of our control. But, there are a few things we should all keep in mind.

I completely understand why any parent would want to keep their children safe from anything that might hurt him or her. But a child getting bumps and bruises is a part of growing up, and they teach children how to be careful and that actions have consequences. Sometimes, children (and adults) need to experience pain.

I read a line here last week that stuck with me. To paraphrase, “Parenting has changed since the days of ‘be careful with that slingshot.'”

Somewhere out there is a balance between the slingshot and the Plexiglass. But what’s most troubling is that I doubt the odds avoiding tragedy differ much between the two styles.

As a former kid whose parents fluctuated crazily from slingshot to protective plastic, I know that survival is 10 percent being watched out for, at most 10 percent watching out for yourself and the rest is luck, fate, the hand of God or whatever you believe.

The abject, consuming fear of parenthood is the tax of parenthood, I figure. Just as the surety of your own indestructability belongs to every kid.

Life itself is very fragile. We should teach our children to celebrate all that they have, not to fear the loss of what they have. One of the most valuable protections we can offer our children is the acknowledgement that we are all mortal, and will leave this earth someday. If we can come to grips with that challenging fact, we can come closer to living each day as fully as possible, living in gratitude for this day and what it brings.

When I look back at my childhood, my teenage years, eveny my young adult years, and evaluate the the risks I took and the judgment I exercised, it’s a wonder that I am alive today and unimpaired. There was very little, if anything, my parents could have done to prevent or even anticipate much of my life-threatening behavior. I shudder when I view my two toddlers through the prism of life-changing events that can occur in the blink of an eye.

It’s particularly interesting to read this this morning, since last night I received a phone call from an anxious friend whose 30-something daughter lives in Los Angeles. She had called her daughter “to make sure she hadn’t burned up,” but the daughter hadn’t answered her phone. I reminded my friend of the time difference (we are on the East Coast), that her daughter was still at work. She laughed, said she knew everything was probably fine, but she just needed to express her worry until she heard from her daughter.

When a crane falls in New York City, I call my son to make sure he wasn’t in the vicinity. When there’s a drive-by shooting in Boston, I call my daughter. My kids are used to this and just laugh at me. But this fear that seems to start with the birth of the child never seems to go completely away. We just have to learn not to drive our kids crazy over things we have no control of. At least my kids have a sense of humor. Sometimes they even call me first: “I wasn’t anywhere near that crane, Mom.”

From Lisa Belkin: My mother still calls me, too, when there is scary news anywhere remotely close to where I am. And if she doesn’t call to check — then I start to worry about her…

No, Prematurely Grey — you define yourself better than you know — parents are not armed with fear biologically, but socially. As a Westerner with a comfortable lifestyle you have simply mimicked the fear around you — excessive and unfounded fear. In Liberia, war-torn for many years, there were commonplace and very real dangers to us such as kidnaping, rape and murder, not birthday snacks or playing on swings. One did not assume that one could protect children from anything. “Arming” oneself and one’s children with fear was the surest way to the grave.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more